Lesson Plan and Guidance for the debate1

Teacher Talking Time

It’s been assumed that TTT, what stands for Teacher Talking Time, is a point we,
educators, should learn to reduce, putting the emphasis on another term within the field
of Classroom Management, named STT or Student Talking Time.

But, reducing does not mean forgetting. In consequence, till what extent should we limit
the time we speak in our classrooms? Does that limit maximize STT? In other words,
does the decrease of TTT foster SLA/FLA?

This lesson plan explores the role TTT, STT and the use of L1, through the critical and
reflective analysis of varied papers, video-taped situations and problems to solve.

1) Underlying theory (one point of view)

a) Teacher talking time (TTT) is the time that teachers spend talking in class, rather
than learners. It can be compared with student-talking time. One key element of many
modern approaches is to reduce the amount of TTT as much as possible to give
learners opportunities to speak, and learn from speaking.2

b) Research has shown that teachers underestimate by almost 40-50% the amount of
talking they do in class. It relates to the concept of 'teacher-talk' which also turns up in
your assignment.

(At this stage, all students are expected to have started reading the module on CM and
the suggested readings. The solving of the self-evaluated tasks, as well as the
reflected ones, is highly recommended, though not compulsory.)

1
Lesson plan sent on the first day of the tutorial period, thus, a week before the debate in the forum.
2
Teachingenglish.org.uk

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First week of the debate

2)

Debate

a) Watch the following video by clicking on this URL –or you can copy and paste it on a
new explorer-.The educator is teaching Spanish as a Foreign Language (please, wait
for some seconds and then click on PLAY. The name is “Clothes Game”):

http://www.primarylanguages.org.uk/training_zone/teachers/using_the_ks2_framework/
oracy/clothes_game.aspx

b) Read the following article by surfing this URL:

http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/think/articles/teacher-talking-time

c) Relate the video-taped classroom situation with the appreciations in the article and
answer:

1) What is the sequence of the lesson? Refer to it briefly.

2) Does the Teacher of Spanish talk too much? Is "teacher-talk" appropriate in average
in the situation shown? Why? Why not?

3) An alternative theory to what all that has been set till now (another point of
view) The Myth of the Silent Teacher [Robert O'Neill - IATEFL April 1994]

Some kinds of teacher-talk are bad. Other kinds of teacher-talk are good; and even
essential

For at least twenty years, teacher-trainers have taught their trainees that a good lesson
is a lesson in which the class do as much of the talking as possible. It has been an
article of faith that teacher-talk is bad because it gets in the way of this goal. The less
the teacher talks, and the more the students talk, the better.

I suspect that many teachers today would feel very uncomfortable if the director of
studies walked into their class and caught them saying more than a few sentences to
their students. Many, perhaps most teachers, I believe, would stop talking and shift as
quickly as possible to an allegedly 'student-centred' mode. This, in practice, usually
means some kind of group-work or pair-work, or perhaps some kind of technique
through which the teacher 'elicits' comment from the class.

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I, personally, have grown more and more suspicious of the assumption that teacher-
talk is automatically bad. I accept that some, perhaps many teachers talk too much, but
I also believe that many teachers do not talk enough. I believe it is wrong to judge or
assess teacher-talk only by reference to its quantity. It is just as important to assess its
quality.

The question is not 'how much teacher-talk is there in a lesson?' but 'what kind of
teacher-talk is there?'

I can put it in a slightly different way. The question should not be 'how much time do
teachers spend talking?' but rather 'How do teachers talk?' 'What do they do while they
are talking to their classes?' 'When they talk, do they engage the attention of the class,
present them with comprehensible input and also allow them to interrupt, comment, ask
for clarification, and so on?' 'Is the teacher checking on comprehension as she or he
talks?' 'If so, what kinds of comprehension-checks are they using?'

I am not saying that teachers should always talk, that good teaching consists only of
talking interactively with the class or individual students. I think that students learn not
only through 'comprehensible input' but also their own output. But I don't believe at all
that a 'good lesson' is one in which students do all or even most of the talking. Some
lessons may be good if they are carefully structured in such a way that students do a
good deal of the talking and at the same time get a lot of feedback, both formally and
informally, from the teacher about their performance. But this is by no means true of all
lessons.3

4) Now, you see this topic is not that straight forward. Considering all the opinions
studied, what would you have done in the same situation, i.e., in the video-taped one to
foster the acquisition of the foreign language?

Second week of the debate

Creation of a Power Point presentation, collaboratively, with the group you’ll be

assigned on due time, summing up the main point in your thread for the debate. It must
be uploaded as the last message, there, on the deadline for this debate.

Evaluation: assignment (study material---CM---assignment). Please, follow all the

instructions as tightly as possible.

3
O’Neill, T. 1994

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Bibliography

Classroom Management. Module of Study. FUNIBER.

O'Neill, R. 1994. The Myth of the Silent Teacher, in Teacher-talk in the language class,
lastly consulted in September, 2010 from
http://www.btinternet.com/~ted.power/esl0420.html

Teacher Talking Time.(n.d), lastly consulted in September, 2010, from:

(http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/think/knowledge-wiki/teacher-talking-time

Esta obra está bajo una licencia Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Spain de Creative Commons.
Para ver una copia de esta licencia, visite http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/es/ o envie
una carta a Creative Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California 94105, USA.